36 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021
AREPORTERAT LARGE
THE INVISIBLE WALL
Inside the secretive Libyan prisons that keep migrants out of Europe.BY IANURBINA
A
collection of makeshift ware-
houses sits along the highway
in Ghout al-Shaal, a worn neigh-
borhood of auto-repair shops and scrap
yards in Tripoli, the capital of Libya. For-
merly a storage depot for cement, the
site was reopened in January, 2021, its
outer walls heightened and topped with
barbed wire. Men in black-and-blue cam-
ouflage uniforms, armed with Kalash-
nikov rifles, stand guard around a blue
shipping container that passes for an of-
fice. On the gate, a sign reads “Director-
ate for Combatting Illegal Migration.”
The facility is a secretive prison for mi-
grants. Its name, in Arabic, is Al Mabani—
The Buildings.
At 3 a.m. on February 5, 2021, Aliou
Candé, a sturdy, shy twenty-eight-year-
old migrant from Guinea-Bissau, ar-
rived at the prison. He had left home
a year and a half earlier, because his
family’s farm was failing, and had set
out to join two brothers in Europe. But,
as he attempted to cross the Mediter-
ranean Sea on a rubber dinghy, with
more than a hundred other migrants,
the Libyan Coast Guard intercepted
them and took them to Al Mabani.
They were pushed inside Cell No. 4,
where some two hundred others were
being held. There was hardly anywhere
to sit in the crush of bodies, and those
on the floor slid over to avoid being
trampled. Overhead were fluorescent
lights that stayed on all night. A small
grille in the door, about a foot wide,
was the only source of natural light.
Birds nested in the rafters, their feath-
ers and droppings falling from above.
On the walls, migrants had scrawled
notes of determination: “A soldier never
retreats,” and “With our eyes closed, we
advance.” Candé crowded into a far cor-
ner and began to panic. “What should
we do?” he asked a cellmate.
No one in the world beyond Al
Mabani’s walls knew that Candé had
been captured. He hadn’t been charged
with a crime or allowed to speak to a
lawyer, and he was given no indication
of how long he’d be detained. In his
first days there, he kept mostly to him-
self, submitting to the grim routines of
the place. The prison is controlled by
a militia that euphemistically calls it-
self the Public Security Agency, and its
gunmen patrolled the hallways. About
fifteen hundred migrants were held
there, in eight cells, segregated by gen-
der. There was only one toilet for every
hundred people, and Candé often had
to urinate in a water bottle or defecate
in the shower. Migrants slept on thin
floor pads; there weren’t enough to go
around, so people took turns—one lay
down during the day, the other at night.
Detainees fought over who got to sleep
in the shower, which had better venti-
lation. Twice a day, they were marched,
single file, into the courtyard, where
they were forbidden to look up at the
sky or talk. Guards, like zookeepers, put
communal bowls of food on the ground,
and migrants gathered in circles to eat.
The guards struck prisoners who
disobeyed orders with whatever was
handy: a shovel, a hose, a cable, a tree
branch. “They would beat anyone for
no reason at all,” Tokam Martin Lu-
ther, an older Cameroonian man who
slept on a mat next to Candé’s, told me.
Detainees speculated that, when some-
one died, the body was dumped behind
one of the compound’s outer walls, near
a pile of brick and plaster rubble. The
guards offered migrants their freedom
for a fee of twenty-five hundred Lib-
yan dinars—about five hundred dol-
lars. During meals, the guards walked
around with cell phones, allowing de-
tainees to call relatives who could pay.
But Candé’s family couldn’t afford such
a ransom. Luther told me, “If you don’t
have anybody to call, you just sit down.”
In the past six years, the European
Union, weary of the financial and polit-
ical costs of receiving migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, has created a shadow
immigration system that stops them be-
fore they reach Europe. It has equipped
and trained the Libyan Coast Guard,
a quasi-military organization linked to
militias in the country, to patrol the
Mediterranean, sabotaging humani-
tarian rescue operations and captur-
ing migrants. The migrants are then
detained indefinitely in a network of
profit-making prisons run by the mi-
litias. In September of this year, around
six thousand migrants were being held,
many of them in Al Mabani. Interna-
tional aid agencies have documented
an array of abuses: detainees tortured
with electric shocks, children raped by
guards, families extorted for ransom,
men and women sold into forced labor.
“The E.U. did something they care-
fully considered and planned for many
years,” Salah Marghani, Libya’s Min-
ister of Justice from 2012 to 2014, told
me. “Create a hellhole in Libya, with
the idea of deterring people from head-
ing to Europe.”
Three weeks after Candé arrived at
Al Mabani, a group of detainees de-
vised an escape plan. Moussa Karouma,
a migrant from Ivory Coast, and sev-
eral others defecated into a waste bin
and left it in their cell for two days, until
the stench became overpowering. “It
was my first time in prison,” Karouma
told me. “I was terrified.” When guards
opened the cell door, nineteen migrants
burst past them. They climbed on top
of a bathroom roof, dropped fifteen feet
over an outer wall, and disappeared into
a warren of alleys near the prison. For
those who remained, the consequences
were bloody. The guards called in rein-
forcements, who sprayed bullets into
the cells, then beat the inmates. “There
was one guy in my ward that they beat
with a gun on his head, until he fainted
and started shaking,” a migrant later
told Amnesty International. “They didn’t
call an ambulance to come get him that